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Saturday, April 25, 2015

The Theology of John Woolman, part 1 of 6

The Life and Times of John Woolman (1720-1772)

The eighteenth century Quaker, John Woolman, is a personal hero of mine. He is most well known as an antislavery advocate, but his reforms go well beyond that. I did my Ph.D. research on Woolman, and have written a bit about him. One of the things I like to do is to think about Woolman's life with others, and think together about what implications his life has for our own. This series of blog posts is based on some talks on Woolman I've given at Reedwood Friends Church in Portland, OR, and North Seattle Friends Church in Seattle, WA.

My goal in these posts is to explore Woolman not only as a sensitive soul, not only
as a social reformer, but as a theologian who had a coherent and comprehensive
conviction of God's role in colonial American society.I hope that this series will help us to view Woolman
in context, to let Woolman challenge us and make us uncomfortable.The highest honor we can give Woolman is to accept him as he was without
trying to mold him into a figure who conforms to our modern sensibilities.

In this post, I want to do two things:

1) First, I want to explore the eighteenth century colonial American context, and, in particular, those pieces that concern Woolman and his vision for the British Atlantic World;

and, 2) second, I want to give a brief overview of his life and how he fit into larger developments within Quakerism.

Naturally, Woolman was a part of the eighteenth century world in which he lived, and his theology, like all theology, was an
attempt to address his deepest concerns and the concerns of his
generation.Theology is contextual, and
in this post I want to highlight aspects of Woolman’s life, colonial Quakerism, and
colonial society that will be a backdrop to the discussions of his theology in posts to come.

Early eighteenth century context

William Penn received a royal charter for the colonizing of Pennsylvania in 1681. He and his colleagues envisioned Pennsylvania as a “Holy Experiment,” a place where Quaker religious ideals could be practiced without threat of persecution. These Quaker leaders also believed that Pennsylvania would become a witness to the rest of the world and that once other nations saw the truth of the Quaker way, the world would become Quaker.

However, eighteenth century Quakerism was diverse, with many
different ways to be a Quaker in good standing. Many of what modern Quakers consider
“Quaker testimonies” were not yet codified. So, for example, what modern Quaker call a testimony of "simplicity" was not really conceived as such in the eighteenth century. It was, rather, a more general tendency toward "plainness." While Quakers eventually became famous for their antislavery views, Quakers in the first part of the eighteenth century were about as involved in slavery as everybody else.There were, though, some general religious insights that became influential among Quakers as they debated slavery internally. In the seventeenth century, early Quaker leader, George Fox (1624-1691), for example, noted that slavery was not consistent with the "Golden Rule." Fox did not call for the immediate emancipation of slaves, but the trajectory he started would eventually move Quakers as a group to take that stand before any other Anglo group.

Additionally, Quakers at this time did not have the "peace testimony," they have been associated with. Rather, they held to what might be called a
non-participation testimony. They generally viewed war as inevitable and even the legitimate duty of government, but they believed they were held out of it. So, Isaac Norris, Sr., who during
his career was both the leader of the Pennsylvania Assembly and Clerk of
Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, was consistent with most Quakers in believing that
paying war taxes did not contradict Quaker principles.In 1711, during the War of Spanish
Succession, Norris and the Quaker led Pennsylvania Assembly voted to raise taxes “for the
Queen’s use,” though everyone knew the monies would be spent to support the war
effort.[1]

John Woolman

John Woolman was born near Burlington, New Jersey, October 19, 1720. He notes in his Journal that early in his life he had a spiritual sensitivity that separated him from his peers and that led him to expect direct experiences of divine present: “…before I was
seven years old I began to be acquainted with the operations of divine love.”

As
a teen and young adult, Woolman experienced spiritual conflict, as he was
tempted to engage in “mirth and wantonness,” all of which stemmed from “an
unsubjected will.” Around 1741 he moved out of the family home and began work in a
shop in Mount Holly. Sometime
in his 22nd or 23rd year, Woolman experienced a
conversion.He felt that he was finally
gaining traction in his spiritual life:

“While I silently ponder on that change wrought in me, I find no
language equal to it nor any means to convey to another a clear idea of it.”

In
this conversion he felt himself to be united to God’s presence in a new way, and
so he saw the world around him in a different light.He
saw that true religion had both inward and outward dimensions. Moreover, his experience was universal in that it encompassed the entire creation and all of humanity, regardless of racial and religious distinctions. This is not to say that he was a "universalist" in our modern sense of the word, because he wasn't as I'll explain in a later post.
However, Woolman's conversion experience reoriented him toward the world around him in radical and comprehensive ways:

“as by [God’s] breath
the flame of life was kindled in all animal and sensitive creatures, to say we
love God as unseen and at the same time exercise cruelty toward the least
creature moving by his life, or by life derived from him, was a contradiction
in itself.”

At the age
of 22, Woolman wrote a bill of sale for a slave, but mentioned while doing so that
slavekeeping was “inconsistent with the Christian religion.” This was an important event for Woolman and he would no longer participate in term of life slave transactions. In his early 20s Woolman was recorded as
minister and began travelling as an officially recognized Quaker minister.As an adult, Woolman would travel as far south as North Carolina, north
into Massachusetts, west into the Pennsylvania frontier, and east to England
where he died in York in 1772.All in
all, Woolman averaged a month per year away from home,[2] but
almost 70% of the content of the Journal concerns his travels.The high concentration of itinerant ministry
material in his Journal is not unique as eighteenth century Quaker
journals tended toward greater fullness during periods of travel.[3] In 1749, he married Sarah Ellis, “a well inclined damsel.” They had two children, but only their daughter, Mary, survived infancy.

Woolman and the Quaker Reformation

Woolman's adult years coincieded with significant changes among Pennsylvania Quakers. Beginning around 1748 a group of young leaders, of which Woolman was only one, joined an existing group of devout, reform-minded Quakers to strengthen the Quaker discipline and to attempt to bring the Quaker public perception in line with stated principles. This period in the middle of the eighteenth century has been described as the
Reformation of American Quakerism by Jack Marietta, and he's written an important book by that name. While we are most familiar with the anti-war and antislavery views that emerged during this time, much of the Quaker reforms were geared toward maintaining internal purity. Thus, these reformers wanted to strictly enforce prohibitions against Quakers marrying non-Quakers, because they thought the practice was diluting their corporate purity. To some extent they were right. Some people were marrying into Quaker families and joining Quaker Meetings, but not out of a sense of conviction. Quakers were both the political and religious power holders in Pennsylvania, allying with them brought with it some economic advantages.

Anthony Benezet, Quaker school teacher and abolitionist

One of the Quaker groups that changed the most under the reformation was the Overseers
of the Press. This group was in charge of approving books for publication. Any Quaker who wished to publish must go through this group. Before 1754, no antislavery document was allowed to be published through Quaker channels. However, once the committee makeup changed in the early 1750s, antislavery protests emerged and with them a new vision of Quaker faithfulness. In 1754, Woolman published Some Considerations on the Keeping of
Negroes through Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, the chief Quaker organizational body in the region.This and
the publication of Anthony Benezet’s (1713-1784) Epistle
of Caution and Advice mark a definite change in official policy in regard to slavery. Neither document carried the authority to discipline or censure slavery among Quakers, that would come later, but they represent the coalescence of a centuries worth of growing antislavery sentiment and the emergence of a new Quaker openness to officially question slavery.

The French and Indian War (1754-1763) also caused introspection and change among Quakers.

French and British imperial
policies had their visions set on the Ohio River Valley to the west of Philadelphia, which made
Pennsylvania a chief theater of their war for global supremacy. These geo-political events put
the "Holy Experiment" to the test. In a series of events known as the "crisis of 1756,"pragmatic Quakers in the Pennsylvania
Assembly decided it was politically necessary to protect the Pennsylvania
frontiers from French and Amerindian forces and levied a tax for the raising of a militia and, essentially,
declared war on the Delaware Indians.This was different than the passive acceptance of taxes “for the Queen’s
Use,” because the Quaker led assembly was actively raising the money and
spending it on military purposes. For reform-minded Quakers, this
was a clear indication that the “Holy Experiment” had gone terribly wrong.Reform minded Quakers held to a more strict
pacifism, and so they were dismayed when their fellow Quaker politicians voted
to raise taxes to conduct a war, and commissioned Quaker magistrates to collect
taxes from the pacifist Quakers, or else confiscate their goods. As a result of these events, some Quakers withdrew from the Pennsylvania Assembly because they knew they could not stop the war bill, which did pass. Some scholars consider this the end of Penn's "Holy Experiment," because nearly seventy-five years of Pennsylvanian history without calling for war had come to an end, and the Quaker majority in the Assembly suffered.

At this time, in 1756,
Woolman started writing his Journal.

In the crucial Philadelphia Yearly Meeting sessions of 1758, an annual gathering where Quakers considered their policies, they took the next step against slavery.When the Yearly Meeting was about ready to table the issues of slavery
for another year, Woolman stood up in the meeting and stated that “…it is
not a time for delay,” and that God had opened Quaker eyes to God'swill and so to
reject that would bring judgment against them.Woolman said, “…it may be that by terrible things in righteousness God
may answer us in this matter.” Woolman's witness was influential and the
Yearly Meeting adopted a minute cautioning its members from participation in
slavery, and appointing a committee to visit slave owners in their homes in order to convince them to manumit their slaves.

With the end of the Holy Experiment, reform minded Quakers
sought a new vision of Quaker witness through corporate purity, benevolence,
antislavery, and the extension of Quaker testimonies into new areas like
anti-war.This new vision was a reaction
to the apathy they saw in their more prosperous peers and to the perception
that Quaker were no better at wielding wealth and influence than anyone else
and so had better leave it off if they were to remain faithful.

The Atlantic Triangular Trade

An important part of their concerns related to the growing trans-Atlantic imperial economy, which provided the economic drive that supported slavery, greed, wealth accumulation and the growing divide between economic classes. During the course of the eighteenth
century, colonists became more and more intertwined in a globalized marketplace
of goods. Farmers paid increasing attention
to foreign markets, and sometimes shipped their goods across the sea. After 1750, the variety of goods
available in the colonies increased dramatically. Colonial port city shops carried
the latest fashions from London and Paris. The most obvious increase in goods
came in those sectors that displayed social and political status: calicoes, mahogany furniture and carriages. Colonial resources were shipped
to European ports, they then either returned to the colonies with luxury good
from Europe, or went down the African coast to pick up slaves before heading
back to the colonies. During
Woolman’s life, homes among the wealthy grew in size, ornation and in the number of
rooms. Woolman noticed all these developments, and warned of the spiritual danger the increased devotion to materialism posed. In fact, the social criticism that runs
through Woolman’s writing more than any other is his condemnation of luxury and
material consumption, which he viewed as causing the evils of colonial society
including slavery.The burgeoning
trans-Atlantic economy sets the background for Woolman’s theology and social
criticisms.

Woolman's Asceticism and Death

In the 1760s Woolman became more
and more radical.His writings take on a
more dramatic apocalypticism and become increasingly virulent.He was always accepted within Quakerism, as shown by the important positions he held in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting through
the 1750s and 1760s, but his comportment
became more intense. For example, in 1761 he began to
wear undyed clothes, because he thought the dye covered over true dirtiness and
signified a person who wanted to pretend to be clean when they were in fact
not.In 1763 he journeyed into the Pennsylvania wilderness to
visit the American Indian town of Wyalusing at a time when the French and
Indian War was raging and his life was in danger. In the mid-1760s he begins to walk
on his travels, so as to be an example of lowliness to slaveholders and to
spend more time in reflection between destinations.
He also had several visions during
these later years.One of which is
absolutely remarkable.In 1772 he
recounted a vision he had during a pleurisy attack a couple years earlier.In this vision he viewed himself as mixed in
with human beings in as much suffering as possible to still be alive.He said he heard the words, “John Woolman is
dead.”At first, he didn’t know what the
words meant, but then he knew that he was once John Woolman and that he was no
longer living in the same way but had joined with the sufferings of others. He talked about this vision as a literal death and resurrection. The old John Woolman was dead, the resurrected John Woolman could see all things from the perspective of eternity and divine perfection.
In 1772 Woolman sailed to England in the cargo
hold of a ship.He landed in London, and
from London he walked north to York.Along the way, he took in many meetings and drew a crowd because
of his peculiar undyed garb.He also
wrote several essays during his journey.He died of the
Small Pox in York.